


Home Again, Home Again

by dimircharmer



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Rey is Luke's daughter, Skywalker extended family, Unreliable Narrator, pov swap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 08:43:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5737132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimircharmer/pseuds/dimircharmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Han Solo has been running for nearly fourteen standard years. He lost his son, his brother-in-law, his baby niece and his wife in the same day. He ran from the aftermath of that, and running from his problems has worked for him ever since, thank you. There's certainly no reason for him to want to go home again, even if he could.</p><p>*</p><p>Han Solo works through grief (poorly) runs (slower than he used to) and finds some complicated history in the Falcon when he picks her up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home Again, Home Again

**Author's Note:**

> Working title was "LUKE, YA DUMB HERMIT"

It’s been a rough few days, for Han Solo. Ok, maybe a rough couple of months- years even. His shoulder aches, there’s a crick in his back, he’s barely going to turn a profit on the rathtars he’s got in the hold, and the old junking freighter needs new shielding and an updated nav system and a hundred other things he can’t afford, and he’s been alone so with just Chewie aboard even they’re starting to drive each other up the walls.

                So it’s been a bad day in a long tradition of very bad days, and if there’s two tbings that his scuzzy traitorous life has taught him, the first is that there’s nothing the galaxy likes more than taking cheap shots at someone who’s already down and bleeding. The other, is if you miss one disaster the next one’s going to be even worse, like the universe is trying to make up for lost time. Once upon a time, he would have asked if that was what the force actually meant, with all the yattering on about the balance of good and evil and whatever. Nowadays he calls it what it is: plain old bad luck. You can just about keep ahead of the exploding disaster if you’re fast and clever and don’t mind bluffing and running or spend too much time thinking about the day when the shockwave will inevitably catch up, because sometimes - about as often as a free drink in a dive bar in wild space- the universe will toss you a bone.

                Case in point: his scanner picked up the Falcon’s signature hovering just outside the gravity well of Jakku this morning. Dropping out of hyperspace to pick her up had been a risk, but he couldn’t help the instinct. When spots of good luck were few and far between, you seized every speck like it was gold dust, especially if the good luck came with a free ride.

                “Look at the old girl,” Han says, watching the tractor beams pull the Millennium Falcon into the Eravana’s cargo hold. “What have they done to her?”

                Chewbacca howled on his right.

                “Nah, we left her in better shape than _this_.” Han ran one hand along the old ship, tracing the tiny foreign pit marks in the ship- someone’s been flying the Falcon extensively in-atmosphere, and it had left dirt and grit all in her joints.

                “What a mess.” He cleared his throat thickly and slapped the hull. He could feel the vibration echo down the whole body of the ship, familiar as his blaster recoil. “Let’s get inside, huh? See what they’ve done to the interior.”

                He goes in with his gun drawn, because this might be the one streak of good luck he’s been waiting on for years, but he’s not _stupid_ , and sure enough, he hears both the hiss of one of the motivators venting gas, but more importantly, he sees the smuggling hatch on top of it slightly offset, and hears the unmistakable sound of two people hushing each other underneath it. He hauls the grate off the top and sees- a pair of kids hiding in his smuggling compartment, is what he sees.

                He may have changed, but the Falcon sure hasn’t.

                “Where’re the others?” He demands. “Where’s the pilot?”

                “I’m the pilot,” says the girl, and she’s too young for that, _surely_.

                “ _You?”_ Chewie agrees with him loudly.

                “No, it’s true: we’re the only ones on board.”

                The other one takes a break from staring at Han’s blaster to look at the girl in disbelief. “You can understand that thing?”

                And Han’s not going to tolerate that kind of respect on his own ship so he tells the kid to knock it off. The two kids (had he ever been that young?) haul themselves out of the cramped compartment, and he asks them where they found it. The answer, from the girl (she’s the one doing the talking, and isn’t _that_ familiar?) is surprising.

“ _Jakku?_ That Junkyard?” The thought of the Falcon sitting dormant under a tarp on a planet full of dust and the bones of old warships made his chest ache. The Falcon’s grave is going to be in space- scattered across several lightyears of some asteroid field, after too close a call with him inside it, not idle and slowly taken apart for scrap. The boy agrees with him.

                “ _Thank_ you.” He says, clearly rehashing an old argument (and isn’t that familiar too) “Junkyard!”

                “Told ya we should have double-checked the Western Reaches” he mutters to Chewie, as though they hadn’t scoured every dustbowl scrap heap planet from here to the middle of what had once been Republic space and back again.

                “Who had it? He says, turning back to the kids, “Ducain?”

                “I stole it from Unkar Plutt. He stole it from the Irving Boys, who stole it from Ducain.”

                “Who stole it from me!” Han finishes for her. Provenance established, he turns away to take in the old access tube to the cockpit. If he remembers right- yep, there’s the scorch mark where Luke deflected one of those training blasts. He still has the orb in here, somewhere.

“Well, you can tell him Han Solo just stole back the Millennium Falcon for good.” He traces one hand along the familiar railings, the ties of wire, the bolts and rivets that adorn the interior of his ship. _His_ ship. He can’t help the grin sneaking across his face.

                “This is the millennium Falcon?” the girl asks, and Han winces as he realizes what had just said. “You’re Han Solo?”

                “I used to be.” He pushes further into his ship, eager to outpace the conversation behind him. Whatever they’ve heard about him, he’s not going to try to live up to it. The Han Solo that _they’d_ heard stories about had gotten old and retired and married, he’d raised an extended family. The Han Solo he is now had lost a son, a brother in law and his baby niece, and walked away from his wife in the same day. He’s not the damn war hero, or the rebellion general or whatever other story has been making the rounds.

He’s perfectly happy to let them argue about his glory days behind him as he checks in on his ship, but then the girl goes and does the unforgivable.

“This is the ship that made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs!” she calls after him.

“ _TWELVE!_ ” Han corrects before he can stop himself. Fourteen, what did they think he was, some spoiled core planet kid taking their parent’s ship out for a joyride? Fourteen parsecs, _honestly._

                But then he ducks beneath the final ridge and there he is, back in the cockpit of _his_ ship. He rests one elbow on the headrest as he leans forward towards the controls. The leather’s still worn the same across the seats, like the old girl was just waiting for them to come back again. Even the controls are-

                “Hey!” He says “Some moof-milker’s put a compression on the ignition line!”

                The girl immediately jumps in “Unkar Plutt did. I thought it was a mistake too, puts too much-“

                “Stress on the hyperdrive.” They finish together. She stares at him, bright eyed, eager, brimming with excitement and still carrying Jakku’s dust on her boots, and she’s looking at him like Han Solo the war hero is her ticket off this rock-

                “Chewie, throw ‘em in a pod, we’ll drop them at the nearest inhabited planet.” She’s smart. She’ll be fine. She’ll be wide eyed and brimming with optimism somewhere he can’t see her hungry desert eyes staring back at him.

                “Wait!” She cries after him, and he resolutely ignores the pang in his heart as she pleads to be taken to the resistance (Leia would take good care of her, some traitorous part of his mind whispers. He tells it to shut up) and then she said something that stopped him in his tracks.

                “He’s carrying a map to Luke Skywalker!” It comes out of nowhere, and hits him like a speeder, somewhere between the gut and the heart. He stops dead in his tracks, and she catches up to him.

                “You _are_ the Han Solo who fought with the rebellion!” She said, as if every word that came out of this kids mouth wasn’t tearing at raw patches he’d been ignoring for years. It’s unerring, how well she finds those. “You knew him!”

                He took a deep breath, and tries not to think of the brother in law who’d taken his kid and left without a word, disappearing the rest of Skywalker next generation the same day they’d lost the first half.

“Yeah, I knew him. I knew Luke.”

                And then, thank god, a screech of metal on metal and the hiss of a docking door across the freighter reminds him who he is: Han Solo, something like a hundred and eighty in debt to four different crime syndicates, hauling rathtars for gang kings, who looked at the only good thing he’s ever had in his life and walked away from it, damn coward that he is. He’s not a war hero, he’s not a family man, he’s not a husband. He’s a smuggler and a bastard and a cheat. He’s not been good at anything in his damn life except running. And now it’s caught up with him, because he should have known that this luck was too good to hold.

He tells the kids to stay put and lowers the ramp to go out and face the music.

                The kids follow him, when he goes to confront the gang, because they’re _kids_ and that’s what kids _do._ He shoves them down a hatch before trigger fingers get really itchy, though. He’s not as quick as he used to be, and it’s been a long time since he’s had anyone but Chewie to have to think about in a fight. He can talk his way out of this, he assures himself, and resolutely ignores the fact that he can feel disaster nipping at his heels. He’s kept ahead of it this long, surely he can outrun it a little longer.

                “Han Solo.” Says his most immediate disaster-in-the-making. “You are a dead man.”

                “Bala Tik!” Han says, in the tone of voice Leia used to call ‘slimy.’ He remembers using it exclusively to talk to her for two weeks after she first described it that way, stopping only after she’d jammed a blaster in his gut and threatened to fire. “What’s the problem!”

                And hey, this he’s used to. This treading water, desperately trying to keep himself from getting killed, to try and talk his way into one more run, one more shot, one more week, one more chance to keep afloat before they shoot him. And then Kanjiklub arrives too, and he keeps talking and making promises they all know he won’t keep, because what’s the alternative? Giving up?

                And then one of their gazes’ lands on the little BB unit that the kids had with them on the shuttle, and Han feels his stomach drop.

                “That BB unit,” one of them says “The first order is looking for one just like it.”

                Please let that be it.       

                “And two fugitives.” Of course it wasn’t.

                Han, damn his big heart, damn the fact that the bounty on this droid and these two kids could get him out of debt with a surplus to spare, says

“First I’ve heard of it.”

                This is starting to get feel dangerous, really dangerous, knife-edge on a floating city dangerous, but what else is new in his life? And then somehow (He suspects the girl) the gates open. He hears rumbling in the hallways of the cargo hold, and all he has time to say is,  

                “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

                And then the next several minutes of his life are blasterfire and panic and running and shouting at Chewie, and somewhere in the midst of all of that, there’s a part of him that thinks _just like old times._

                Then Chewie gets _shot_ , and that’s _not_ like old times at all. Usually, it’s him getting shot, and Chewie covering their escape with the bowcaster. He’s always want to try the ‘caster, but he can think of better circumstances in which to get the chance. By the time he’s back in the hanger, he’s really only hanging on by sheer determination and the skin of his teeth. The kids, finally, round the corner of the hanger, no rathgars in pursuit.

                “Hey!”

                They hear him, thankfully, and start charging towards him. Neither of them have blasters, the idiots, so he sends the boy up the ramp to take care of Chewie and tells the girl to slam the door shut behind them. He trusts her more to keep her calm in a fight, and he’s never been able to completely break Chewie of the habit of biting when he’s anxious, and the leather jacket has a better chance of blunting that then the linen desert wraps the girl’s wearing.

                He charges past all three of them, hurtling through the confines of the Falcon like he’d never left her, and tosses himself bodily into the pilots seat. He doesn’t even have his earpiece all the way in before he starts flipping switches, less muscle memory as much as it is instinct, even after all these years. This would be so much easier if he had a-

                He has a co-pilot.

                “Hey!” The girl’s already slamming switches on her end, in an order that doesn’t make any sense unless-

                “Unkar Plutt installed a fuel pump too,” she said apologetically as she secures here own earpiece. “If we don’t prime that, we’re not going anywhere.”

                All these changes made to his baby girl without him. “I hate that guy.”

                She gives him a look which most people shoot each other about him; the look that says ‘get in line.’

                “And you could use a co-pilot.” She says

                “I got one!” Han protests “He’s right back-“

                Chewie howls from the lounge. The girl will do. There’s still the problem with the compressor, and the coolant’s leaking, and something’s overloading, and the girl is slotting into place around him in the cockpit like she’s always been there. She’s a little gunshy, but she knows her way around the guts of a ship, and she emerges having ripped the fuel compressor straight from the moorings, and then she _cheeks_ him about it; waving the compressor in his face heedless of the fact that sparks from the electrical mishap are still smoldering in her arm wrappings.

                Oh, he _likes_ this one.

                 He keeps half an eye on her as he finishes punching them through to Hyperdrive, and lives a little vicariously through the unconstrained joy on her face. He’s always been a gambler, and he’d bet double-or-nothing all the debt he has that she’d been waiting to go into space for years.

                He stands abruptly to go check on Chewie- it doesn’t have anything to do at all with the way that she’s looking through the window like she wants to drown in it. Nothing at all.

*

                So, he’s harbouring a pair of First Order fugitives and a droid on his ship, and the droid has a map to his brother in law hidden in it. No free drinks in space after all. But it’s late, and he’s had a long, weird day, and there’s at least twelve hours of hyperspace travel between here and Takodana, so he tells them all to get to bed. The boy is out and snoring within seconds; the kind of efficiency that you only get from being ordered to sleep your whole life.

                Huh.

                He might be carrying something significantly more dangerous than a rebel and his BB unit.

                He’ll deal with that in the morning. Instead, he turns to the girl.

                “You wanna lean how to fix a jammed gunner?” He offers.

                Her grin lights up practically the whole passage, and she scrambles off to grab the toolkit, left on the floor from what had been a damn good emergency patch job on the ruptured propulsion tank. He, in turn, goes knocking through all the hidden compartments and hidey-holes he’s had installed in the Falcon over the years. Most of them are empty, of course, but one of them turns up a decent pair of blasters, a brick of glitterstim emerges from another and a pack of jerky he thinks he’d stashed there over ten years ago in the third.

                He tears into the packet with his teeth, and offers a piece of the stale meat to the girl when she comes back with the toolbox. She stares at the packet like it’s behind glass.

                Oh yeah, he reminds himself. Desert kid.

                “It’s not gonna _bite_ ” he says, cheeks full of salted Bantha meat. He shakes the packet at her. “Go on.”

                She pulls a tiny piece of meat from the pack and pops it in her mouth, sucking the spice off her fingers as she goes. Her eyes widen. Han grins as he pries up the access panel by the gunner hatch. He leaves the pack of meat between the two of them, a wordless invitation. She steals another piece when she thinks he isn’t looking, before starting to unwind the long linen wraps around her arms. No need for them outside the desert sun, Han guesses. The silence stretches on for a moment- there’s a really nasty looking scar tracing wrist to elbow on one of her forearms, and he averts his eyes. He’s not going to turn into a grandmother and ask if she’s been getting enough to eat, he’s _not._

                She’s uncomfortably familiar, this scrawny wire frame of a desert girl. Her hair is pulled back in the three knots found on desert planets and junkyards everywhere, the same ones he remembers Luke pulling his niece’s hair into before- well. Before. He shakes himself to get rid of that train of thought, and turns his attention back to the panel in front of him. Wherever the little sprog was now, she was safe with Luke, and the rest didn’t bear thinking about.

                “So. Jakku, huh?” Han Solo, legendary rebel general, making awkward small talk with a kid younger than his son. Leia would be proud. “Whatcha get up to planetside? Haul cargo? Repair work?”

                She hunches in around her knees, and for one truly horrible (she was from the Outer Rim, after all) moment Han thinks she’s going to answer ‘slave’ but-

“No. I’m just a scavenger.”

                “Well, 'just a scavenger,' you’re pretty handy in a cockpit.” He grunts, trying to pry a rusted bolt out of socket, “Who taught you that?”

                “Old flight sims, from the ships. Lots of them still had training programs in their banks.”

                Han pulls his head back out to stare at her guileless expression. She hands him the wrench he needs. “You pulled a backflip and a slalom course through the Graveyard of Giants and that was your first time in the air except _training sims?”_

                “It’s not like I had a _choice_!” she replied indignantly, mistaking his incredulity for disapproval. “The turret was stuck, and the shields were down and-“

                “Kid!” Han is laughing now, and probably smearing engine grease on his face, and the girl is staring at him “Kid, you did good.”

                She flushes. “Oh.”

                He grins at her, wide and easy, this kid who picked his ship on a lark and a prayer to get off Jakku. She grins back, still suspicious and probably rightly so, but there’s a little bit of hard won pride sneaking in around the cracks. Still, skill like that in a ship like the falcon, no training? She’s _wasted_ on Jakku. He’s still grinning as ducks back into the access hatch, buried up to his chest in the guts of the falcon as she pops another piece of jerky into her mouth.

                “You got a name, kid?”

                “Rey.”

                Han freezes, hands tight around a pair of braces in his ship and feels his stomach drop out from under him alarmingly. It doesn’t mean anything, he tells himself sternly. It’s a common name and a common hairdo and there are lots of young girls in the universe.

“You got a last name, Rey?” Forget valour and courage in war, he should be given a damn award for how much his voice doesn’t shake on those six words.

                “Don’t remember.” She says, and that’s… that’s sure something. He pulls himself out from the access port again, back creaking.

                “I have one,” She assures him, with the kind of certainty that only the young can keep up without it eating them alive. “I’ll just have to ask my family what it is when they come back for me.”

                Han chokes. “They _left_ you on Jakku? How long ago was that?”

                “Five thousand and eighty days.”

                Han, with a stone in his stomach, does the math to confirm what he very nearly knows, and yeah, that’s almost to-the-day the date when Ben-

                When his son-

                “You were alone on Jakku for fourteen years?”

                “They’ll come back.” She says again, “They promised.”

Han Solo is going to punch his idiot brother-in-law right in the jaw. It’s one of the few decisions he’s made in several years that he’s confident his wife will approve of whole-heartedly.

He wipes his hands on the rag in the toolbox, instead of responding to any of that. She’s picked up the empty packet of jerky and is running her fingers along inside it, sucking any residual juice off her didgets one at a time. He remembers trying to feed her spoonfulls of mashed fruit in a highchair, and doing very little except getting it all over her face. Her thin-boned, hungry eyed appearance had been unsettling enough before Han knew he had changed her diapers, and blew raspberries at her when she was a fat happy baby.

“Well,” he says, trying to keep is voice light, “Rey. How about we clean up and we can see what Plutt left on this ship in the way of food, huh? Consider it thanks for helping me find the falcon again.”

She packs up the toolbox with so quickly she nearly blurs, and grins at him like he’s offered her a whole system.

 He resolves to spoil her rotten.

First, though, he has to offer her a job.

*

Han Solo must have married into the most suicidally loyal, pigheadedly stubborn family in the entire damn galaxy. He knows the Falcon isn’t the prettiest ship in the sky, but to turn it down to go back to _Jakku_ \- Yeah, there’s no doubt she’s her father’s daughter. Even still, she’s willing to chase after Finn when he tries to defect, tries to argue him out of saving his own skin for the greater good, and he can’t help but see some of Leia in her too.

Maz, the old bat, sees him watching.

“Who’s the girl?”

“Don’t you start, Maz.”

Her eyes, not that they need it, widen. “Han Solo, don’t tell me that you have a _daughter_ after all these years.”

“No!” He’s been many things over the years, but he’s also a married man. “Maz, you know me better than that.”

She humphed, probably in agreement, and leaned back in her chair.

“Family, then?”

“Maz, you know I don’t have any family to speak to.”

She scoffed. “Han Solo, you unspeakable coward. You _have_ a family. It was you who decided to leave, those years ago, not them. You know you could return at any moment, it is _you_ who have decided to stay away.”

Oh yeah, _this_ is why he doesn’t frequent Maz’s watering hole. He’d almost convinced himself it was because of whatever it was brewing between her and Chewie.

He pushes his chair from the table and stands up. “Not going to happen.”

“You cannot run away from this forever, Han.” She calls after him

He can feel her gaze on him as he makes his way through the crowd, back towards the door. “Watch me!” He calls back over his shoulder.

*

He’s watching his wife disembark an A-wing less than an hour later. She’s still regal, for all that she goes by ‘general’ now, instead of princess, and she stands there with her hands on her hips and does nothing but _look_ at him. She looks so much like she did back in their first war together he can’t help but smile, just a little bit.

“You changed your hair.”

“Same jacket.” She doesn’t even snap her gaze down to look, and this, this is the Leia he had missed.

“No, new Jacket.”

For some reason, that does it, this breaks the tension, and before he knows it he’s stepped forward and he’s hugging his wife for the first time in fourteen years. He buries his nose in her hair, and magnanimously decides to ignore the dampness he can feel against his chest.

“I- I saw him, Leia.” Her fingers clutched at the back of his jacket. “I saw our son. He was here.”

“Oh _Han_.”

And he’s not crying, not at all, because there’s more he has to tell his wife, who has always known how to handle bigger news better than he did, who he knows won’t run away from this.

“He’s got Luke’s little girl.” And he can feel her stiffen at that. “Luke left her on some dustbowl Outer Rim planet to keep her safe and I picked her up by chance and now-“

“And now Ben has her.”

He sighs into her hair, resisting the urge to nudge the coil of braids over with his nose. “Yeah.”

She pulls back, and the last decade and a half look much better on her than they do on him.

“Some good news, at least,” She said “We’ve finally found the map to Luke.”

“I know, I’ve seen it.” Han couldn’t have kept himself from bragging if his life depended on it. “In the annoying little BB unit.”

She smiles at him, nothing but bittersweet, these days, and he takes her hand as they make their way into the transport. This is the end of it, he decides. He’s not going to run away from this one, with two of his flesh and blood on the line, and Luke on the horizon for the first time in decades. This one, he’s going to see through.

Leia, as if he’d read his thoughts, squeezes his fingers and smiles at him. He leans into her shoulder, as they settle down side-by-side in the back of the ship.

“We’ll get ‘em back.” He promises her, and he means all three of them. It's one of only a few he's made in decades he intends to keep. His family’s been apart too damn long.

 

**Author's Note:**

> whoops.


End file.
